The Capitol building looks like it always has, but it has a new architect
More than any other building, the U.S. Capitol stands as the symbol of the republic. The building itself is just one of many in an historical collection encompassing 18 million square feet of building space over 570 acres. Overseeing it all, the architect of the Capitol. The current architect has held the job for just about a year. Thomas Austin joined the Federal Drive with Tom Temin.
Interview transcript:
Tom Temin: I don’t know where you begin to talk about what the Architect of the Capitol does these days, but let’s start with the Capitol itself, which is one of the oldest, or maybe the oldest, that you deal with. And what are the challenges these days?
Thomas Austin: Well, it is indeed the oldest building we have as part of our AOC portfolio. It began back in 1790 when it was authorized for construction. Pierre L’Enfant, who was given the charge of constructing the capital of Washington, D.C., said the Capitol Hill was a pedestal awaiting a monument, which is a great line. I’ve always loved that. But the construction of the Capitol didn’t actually begin until 1793 when George Washington helped lay the cornerstone of the building. It’s been constructed, it’s burned, it’s reconstructed, it’s expanded nine times over its history. So what you see now is quite a bit different than what we had back in 1793. But it is our oldest building in our whole portfolio.
Tom Temin: And what are the challenges of keeping it up to snuff? It probably got a lot of renovations after it was broken into on that famous Inauguration Day. But it’s a building that is both historic, it’s museum, but people have offices in there and there’s thousands of people that traipse in and out every day.
Thomas Austin: Every day. It’s definitely a working piece of historic architecture. And as you said, Congress has to do their job, both chambers of Congress, both the House and the Senate, conduct their business there on a daily basis. We have all their key staffers in the buildings, not just in that building, but also in the office buildings. But a lot of staffers run through it every day, we have a lot of dignitaries coming through. We host things like the presidential inauguration and the lying in state. But some of the challenges we have is it is indeed our oldest building. And retrofitting the old technology to new technology, whether it be digital architecture or just their heating and ventilation systems and keeping the building functional. But Congress hosts a lot of events there as well. We want to make sure that it is a welcoming professional. It meets the moment for when Congress has people coming to visit them there or conduct just their official business. And because our paramount mission is to make sure that Congress can do their mission, we have to schedule our repairs at times that do not impact their jobs. So we’re always doing work at night. We have three shifts that work there every day, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. We try to schedule a lot of our maintenance during congressional recess times, but that’s not enough time in the course of a year, so we do a lot of work at night. Besides the aging infrastructure that is incorporated just in the Capitol itself, the challenges of just keeping it, making sure our work does not interfere with Congress’ work.
Tom Temin: And you also then have the congressional office buildings and the Supreme Court and all of those other places. What is the fundamental challenge of old buildings besides the infrastructure of wiring for computers and so forth? And you’ve seen some bad attempts at updating in recent years, but some of the buildings that Congress occupies for its offices are quite old too. And how do you keep them up?
Thomas Austin: Well, Congress has expanded over the years as well, not just the number of members of Congress, the number of states have expanded or the representation has changed, but also there’s staffing challenges that have happened. So although the Capitol goes back to 1793, we have office buildings both on the House and the Senate side that go back to the early 1900s. Cannon Office Building being one of the more recent ones we were doing, which goes back to 1908, but its sister building, the Russell Office Building, was constructed basically at the exact same time. So on the House side we have five office buildings, and on the Senate side we have three. Those go back as long as 120 years ago. We’re just finishing a major renovation of the Cannon House Office Building that will be complete at the end of this calendar year. And we’re looking toward a future of renovating these buildings like the Russell Office Building on the Senate side, but also the Rayburn and some other ones as well. So the challenge we have with those is aging infrastructure. And because a lot of these buildings were built during the 1900s, we kind of hit, unfortunately, kind of the sweet spot where we were using both lead and asbestos, which obviously now we know not to do, but during that time were considered very useful materials in building construction. They were thought to be fireproofing for asbestos and lead to do a lot of things like rust prevention and things of that nature. Unfortunately, those created hazards, and as we do these renovations, we’re remediating those, we are taking those out. But to take down a building the size of a Cannon or a Rayburn or a Russell is a huge challenge because we still have to make sure, as I said earlier, that Congress can do their job. And finding space for our representatives and our senators to have an office for them, as well as their staff, while we’re doing a major renovation is a challenge. There’s just not excess space on Capitol Hill. We just can’t put people in another building and call it a day. So finding that swing space is a limiting factor. Being able to do the long-term capital reinvestiture that these buildings require is also a challenge because it’s a challenge, of course, in terms of money. But our access and our authorizations, and we want to make sure that we’re not making a disruptive experience not just for Congress but for all our visitors coming as well. Same kind of challenge we have with the Supreme Court or the Library of Congress.
Tom Temin: We’re speaking with Thomas Austin. He’s Architect of the Capitol. And what is the size of your staff? What does the office itself consist of in terms of people and resources?
Thomas Austin: So we have, overall, the whole Architect of the Capitol staff is just over 2,500 people, and we have them spaced out over nine different jurisdictions, as we call them. They run the complete gamut of services, everything from what you’d expect, like engineers and architects, but also things like painters and plumbers and electricians and insulators and laborers and recyclers. We have visitor guides and visitor assistants. We have very technical things like the folks who have worked at the Botanic Garden who do plant specialization. Horticulture work. We have our groundskeepers for the Capitol grounds and arboretum team that go out there and do not just the lawns, which is a huge part of it, but also our trees and our plants, bushes and shrubs. We have people who do historical preservation. We take care of thousands of works of art. Overall, the 2,500 people in the Architect of the Capitol are just a very broad spectrum of specialized skills and abilities, and it continually blows me away having this job less than a year, just seeing all the different challenges that our team goes through on a daily basis. I was giving a talk this morning to a group of kids that came in as part of Bring Your Children to Work Day. Because Congress is in recess right now, it’s a nice thing we do for our team. When I see their eyes glaze over and we say that we do more than 500,000 work orders per year, I don’t think people really fully appreciate that that’s how many different little tasks it takes to keep this huge campus working.
Tom Temin: And one of the things you have to have in mind, I guess, is historic preservation itself. Even in a renovation of the Cannon, you don’t want to have it come out looking like an airline terminal.
Thomas Austin: Absolutely. The historical preservation is something that we, as the foremost of our thoughts when we’re doing and planning these renovations, probably second only to functionality of the building. But when we have those historic means and methods of doing construction like a Cannon, one of our biggest challenges is just plaster, doing historic plaster work. Not something we do a lot of these days. And so the skilled trades in order to do that kind of work are limited. Same thing with our decorative painting, and we have things like guild work in some of the buildings — again, things we usually don’t do in our modern office buildings, but something that we want to preserve. This piece of history, because we talk about this in the Architect of the Capitol all the time: We are just one chapter in a long book of this history of this Capitol stretching back over 230 years in one direction and hopefully at least another 230 years in the next direction. But we are but one chapter. And so the sense of awe and wonder as we come into these buildings, we want to preserve that for the next generation. We don’t want it to look like just a recently constructed office building of steel and glass. We want to have those columns and the plaster and the paintings and the murals and the mosaics and all those things that go into it, the statues and all of those things that people walk in and they just say, wow, we want to preserve that feeling for the next generation as well.
Tom Temin: And there are other capitals of the world that are much older than Washington, D.C. London is pretty old, Paris, Rome — they go back quite a few. Jerusalem. Is there an international kind of knowledge base where if you have something like, “How do I take care of that thing?” you can call somebody in Rome and say, “Oh yeah, we’ve done that.”
Thomas Austin: Yeah, and I’m going to mess up this acronym, but there is a group called the International Panel of Parliamentarians for Freedom of Religion or Belief (IPPFoRB), that is currently being headed by Canada. And so we do knowledge sharing between these different organizations. And it’s an informal thing that we do. Just recently, I had the lady usher of the black rod come over from Parliament in London, and her buildings go back all the way. It’s more of a direct correlation to the Senate sergeant-at-arms. But for us, they also take care of their buildings and operations, and we were sharing some of the challenges. The two things that struck her when she visited us were the size of our basement, because apparently back in the 1300s when Parliament was constructed, people were smaller and they didn’t have as much space. So she was very envious of the size of our basements, our corridors and tunnels. But also, she was really blown away by how well our floors were looked after, which I originally thought was kind of an odd thing to comment on. But because of the care that our team takes, even with all these millions of footfalls per year going over our floors, just that one detail really stood out to her as a difference between the different organizations.
Tom Temin: Yeah, clean floors mean clean house, I think is what my grandmother used to say. Any of them haunted? Any of the buildings?
Thomas Austin: Well, I would say the only building that has a reputation for being haunted — and I hope the librarian will forgive me — is the Adams Building in the Library of Congress. Because we have operations that go on 24/7, we have a team that goes through there and does things like fire system inspections and cleaning. They actually rotate the team through the Adams, because no one likes to be there on a week-to-week basis. They always hear strange noises coming from the Adams Building at night, and with the stacks around you and everything being very cloistered, it does feel a bit eerie, I have to say.
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